In private she was said to be warm but in public Thatcher remained, for many, the wicked witch of the south
'It's a wonder nobody has taken a gun to that woman.' This was my mother speaking at some point in the middle 1980s. She was a gentle and peaceable woman – my mother, that is – and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona – for what she was. At the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, the pantomime featured the Wicked Witch of the South; everyone knew her real identity.
I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. She was immensely brisk. We watched as her high heels went click-click-click across the stones of the Acropolis and the cement floors of Tito's steel mills. I was just behind her at the civic museum in Dubrovnik when the local guide explained a model showing the elaborate system of ancient wells and tunnels that had provided the city with fresh water no matter how fierce the siege. "You see," she announced in her self-satisfied way, "it just goes to show what people can do when they have to."
This was the great leader in her favourite pose as Samuel Smiles: human beings didn't need to be helped – they needed to help themselves. There were rumours of a different philosophy, at least in personal relationships. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. "She's jolly nice," one of them said, "much better to work for than [James] Callaghan." He'd been a bully, she said, whereas Mrs T was warm and understanding. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. A meeting in Downing Street had left the Pakistan leader besotted with the older woman's wisdom and generosity: '"I tell you, she's such a kind person."
Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. There had been Churchill and his defiance; there had been Kipling and his If; there had been her father in his grocer's shop in Grantham. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. Keith Joseph was her guru. Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield – one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. The economic crisis that Britain faced had been created not by the working class itself, these wholesome people that Sir Keith remembered from his vac weeks in Barnsley, but by a working-class leadership that was determined to bring the whole system crashing down.
Mrs T shared the same reductionism. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. Not the loss of imperial markets, not lazy management, not the education system, not the decline of the industrial ethic: bitter men standing on platforms and asking for a show of hands to down tools were solely to blame.
It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. A strong pound crippled exports and emptied factories. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry.
The day before she died I passed through Greenock on the train. In 1979 it had a mile or so of shipyards, a sugar works and factories that still made rope and ship's fittings. On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all.
We can't blame (or credit) her for all of this, of course. But she personified the change from meaning to meaninglessness in so many settlements and lives, and for this reason she is hard to forgive.
Strident, divisive, and in her own view infallible, and for these reasons hard to mourn.
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